The next political speech you hear may be written by an AI

Humanity has made huge advancements in chatbot technology over the past few years. Artificial Intelligence systems can now imitate Philip K Dick, write convincing thinkpiece pitches and even pass the Turing test. However, they’ve never quite gotten the hang of political speechwriting and, in some cases, wind up sounding downright subhuman. However, a team from University of Massachusetts, Amherst announced on Monday that they have built a robotic writer able to pen passable political sentences. The Amherst team designed their AI using Google’s n-gram technique, wherein the computer searched for sequences that include a given (“n”) word to learn how it fit into the sentence syntax. It did so across more than 4,000 floor speeches delivered during 53 US Congressional floor debates. After crunching nearly 50,000 sentences, the AI can…